Harold Arlin engineered new era of baseball broadcasting

The Pittsburgh Pirates completed a sweep of the Philadelphia Phillies with an 8-5 win Aug. 5, 1921, at Forbes Field.

Among the attendees, so the story goes, was Harold W. Arlin, announcer for KDKA, the station owned by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co.

Arlin bought a box seat, improvised a desk with a wood plank and delivered an account of the game into what he called a "mushophone," a primitive microphone with the appearance of a "tomato can with a felt lining" and communicated with a transmitter behind home plate.

Thus was born the first radio baseball broadcast.

"It was like watching a regular ballgame and announcing what happened," Arlin said on a program celebrating KDKA's 65th anniversary. "If we had known we were really starting history, we would have made some notes."

We'll take Arlin's word for it. Contemporary accounts of the broadcast seem to have disappeared, as have the broadcasts themselves - there are no surviving radio broadcasts from 1920 to 1922.

The Pittsburgh Gazette Times omitted mention of it in its coverage of the game, a strange oversight considering the paper reported Aug. 4 that "The details of the Davis Cup tennis matches at the Allegheny Country Club this week will be sent broadcast by radiophone through a transmitting station installed in the press stand at the courts" and picked up and retransmitted by KDKA.

Newspapers that year mentioned broadcasts of other sports as well.

The (Fairmont) West Virginian reported June 10 KDKA's test station would be relaying "radiophone messages" from the Jersey City, N.J., ringside where Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier would be vying for the heavyweight championship July 2.

The Pittsburgh Post Oct. 6 mentioned Westinghouse's three stations "successfully broadcast" the first game of the World Series between the Yankees and Giants "play by play, inning by inning."

Even if Arlin hadn't kept his date with baseball history, he had a noteworthy career.

Born in 1895 in La Harpe, Ill., Arlin earned a degree in engineering from the University of Kansas and was hired by Westinghouse.

The western Illinois native's inquisitive nature led him to the shack atop the roof of the nine-story Westinghouse factory building in East Pittsburgh that served as KDKA's first station.

He said, "I heard they were building this transmitting station, and I went up to see it just through curiosity. And while I was up there, I found out that they were looking for a regular announcer. And I said I'd like to try that. So they let me try it, and apparently I was satisfactory."

The gig lasted five years. Arlin attained national and even international popularity as the nation's first regular radio announcer.

He was Mr. October in 1924, when he won a popularity poll for that month in Radio Age.

He also pleased listeners across the pond who received KDKA's shortwave broadcasts. A London newspaper called him "the best known American voice in Europe."

Newspapers in 1925 mentioned his "virile, resonant voice, his exceedingly clear enunciation, his tact in handling people under the peculiar nervous strain of broadcasting, his coolness and good judgment under trying circumstances, his wide knowledge of music, sports and other matters most commonly broadcast."

Arlin had a penchant for celebrity interviews, with subjects that included movie actress Lillian Gish, and the "Sultan of Swat," Babe Ruth.

One story had Arlin introducing Ruth, who was supposed to read a speech. But Babe was beset by mic fright. Arlin snatched the speech from him and read it for him. For weeks, the station received letters complimenting Ruth on his "fine voice."

But in 1925, Arlin gave up his announcing career to become personnel manager for the Westinghouse Electric Products Co. at Mansfield, Ohio.

He settled in the Mansfield community, working for Westinghouse into the 1960s.

He was president of a local school board and even had a high school stadium in Mansfield named after him.

Arlin, who died in 1986, left another legacy in the 1970s to major league baseball. His grandson Steve, a baseball star at Ohio State who eventually was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame, pitched for the San Diego Padres and the Cleveland Indians.

Harold W. Arlin's life came full circle in 1972 when, with his grandson pitching for the Padres, he shared the microphone with Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince to do a couple of innings of play by play over - no surprise - KDKA. Only a mushophone would've made the moment perfect.